It’s Time to DOGE NPR and PBS

Really it was time to defund them decades ago.

I’ve long supported taking taxpayer funding away from NPR and PBS. One reason is obvious, and I won’t rehash it much here — both outlets are completely captured by Globalist and Leftist ideologues. So much so that they are hardly capable of even understanding the views of most of the taxpayers that fund them. “All things considered?” Not by a long shot.

NPR and PBS have long been biased, too biased. But in recent years, it has gotten even worse as Sasha Stone observes.

All Things Not Considered

I particularly like this from Stone’s post:

Long before controversial CEO Katherine Maher was hired at NPR, listeners were already dropping like flies. Any honest person knows that NPR changed dramatically. Even my sister, a die-hard Democrat, joked with me in 2020 that she had to stop listening because every episode seemed to be about a “transgender migrant crossing the border for an abortion in Texas.”

I could continue having fun with NPR’s bias. You know I could. But instead I want to dwell on a different neglected reason NPR and PBS should be defunded. It should be an obvious reason, but first you have to see it.

And, being older than average, I can see it. For I was a child before cable television became a thing. Growing up in Dallas, I can still remember the available channels: 4, 5, and 8 were the available networks. 11 was the independent fun channel. 13 was public television. Then there were three UHF channels with iffy reception: 21, 33, and 39. Tuning into to those could be an art. And, unless I’m forgetting one or two obscure channels, that was it. Those were the TV channels we had in the Dallas of my childhood.

Funny how you can remember numbers from your childhood yet you misplace car keys and, this morning, my daily planner.

Anyway, PBS — 13 for us — was a Godsend. I loved astronomy and, other than the moon missions, PBS and its show Nova was the place for that. I also had an odd sense of humor. And guess where Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first broadcast in the United States? Channel 13 in Dallas.

I could mention other programs I liked. But it suffices to say that PBS (and probably NPR but I rarely listened to that) expanded what was available to TV viewers with programming that other channels just were not broadcasting . . . in the 1970’s and before.

But when cable television came into its own, different sorts of programming became available. And then fast forward a couple more decades and you get the internet. At first the internet was not the place for video as the bandwidth available could not handle that. It could barely handle photos.

But today? If I have an astronomy fix, I can get on free youtube and go to Astrum in glorious 4K or to that popular nerd, Anton Petrov. I’m now much more into history than as a callow youth. And again, there is so much history available. Over at Lotuseaters, I enjoy the Epochs series. Instagram also has an abundance of interesting history in short formats.

Of course, podcasts play a similar role for those who like to listen to something as they drive or do chores. If there is a subject of interest to you, there are probably several podcasts on it. And if you still like your radio as I do, satellite radio has greatly expanded what is available.

I could continue stating the obvious, but you get the picture. If public television and radio were ever necessities or at least very helpful, they simply are not today. First, cable and now the internet and satellite provide a wide variety of programing on any number of subjects. Personally, I do not nearly have the time to hear and watch all I want to! So today PBS and NPR are just two contributors in a vast sea of contributors, and not very good ones at that. Not anymore.

So PBS and NPR are no more entitled to public funds than this substack is. If people still want it, let them fund it, not the taxpayers. The average taxpayer does not want to pay for it. Heck, most don’t watch or listen to those channels anymore, and they have become more and more unlistenable.

I will go further. That PBS and NPR still receive federal funding is an indictment of how wasteful and unresponsive the federal government became pre-Trump. Whether they will still receive taxpayer funding will be a good indicator of whether the federal government can be made responsive to taxpayers and to reality for that matter.

It is past time to DOGE PBS and NPR. Otherwise, the federal government will remain as absurd as Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.

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Lead image: An employee of the Ministry of Silly Walks going to work. Not to be confused with a worker for the U. S. federal government.